John Keats

John Keats

26 quotes

The English Romantic poet John Keats is someone whose pithy observations have become part of everyday conversation. Whether reflecting on Beauty or Poetry, John Keats brought uncommon clarity to every subject. 36 of John Keats's sharpest quotes live here, spanning themes of Beauty, Poetry, Truth, Nature, and Love. Among their most shared lines: "Land and sea, weakness and decline are great separators, but death is the great divorcer for ever."

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.”

— John Keats

Art

All Quotes by John Keats

“I will give you a definition of a proud man: he is a man who has neither vanity nor wisdom one filled with hatreds cannot be vain, neither can he be wise.”

— John Keats

Wisdom

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”

— John Keats

Experience

“What the imagination seizes as beauty must be truth.”

— John Keats

Beauty

“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”

— John Keats

Intelligence

“I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion - I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more - I could be martyred for my religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that.”

— John Keats

Love

“I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.”

— John Keats

Death

“Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.”

— John Keats

Beauty

“Love is my religion - I could die for it.”

— John Keats

Love

“My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.”

— John Keats

Imagination

“Poetry should be great and unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one's soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself, but with its subject.”

— John Keats

Poetry

“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”

— John Keats

Nature

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.”

— John Keats

Art

“A thing of beauty is a joy forever: its loveliness increases it will never pass into nothingness.”

— John Keats

Beauty

“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

— John Keats

Poetry

“There is an electric fire in human nature tending to purify - so that among these human creatures there is continually some birth of new heroism. The pity is that we must wonder at it, as we should at finding a pearl in rubbish.”

— John Keats

Nature

“There is not a fiercer hell than the failure in a great object.”

— John Keats

Failure

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections, and the truth of imagination.”

— John Keats

Imagination

“You speak of Lord Byron and me there is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task.”

— John Keats

Great

“Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”

— John Keats

Poetry

“Scenery is fine - but human nature is finer.”

— John Keats

Nature